Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, this book shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults. Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began actively shaping it through the creation of fictional worlds where history, cultural data, and pop-realism interacted freely.
Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults. Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began actively shaping it through the creation of fictional worlds where history, cultural data, and pop-realism interacted freely. Featuring brutal Stalinist supermen, gay space travelers, suburban juvenile delinquents, and student activists turned tech-savvy saboteurs, these comics ultimately revealed a volatile era more precisely than any mainstream press. Italian comics developed a journalistic, ideology-free, and sardonic approach in representing the key events of their times. Drawn and Dangerous makes a case for the importance of the adult comics of the '70s and '80s. During those years, comic production reached its peak in maturity, complexity, and wealth of cultural references. The comic artists' analyses of the political and religious landscape reveal fresh perspectives on a transformative period in Italian history.
Food stood at the centre of Mussolini's attempt to occupy Ethiopia and build an Italian Empire in East Africa. Seeking to redirect the surplus of Italian rural labor from migration overseas to its own Empire, the fascist regime envisioned transforming Ethiopia into Italy's granary to establish self-sufficiency, demographic expansion and strengthen Italy's international political position. While these plans failed, the extensive food exchanges and culinary hybridizations between Ethiopian and Italian food cultures thrived, and resulted in the creation of an Ethiopian-Italian cuisine, a taste of Empire at the margins. In studying food in short-lived Italian East Africa, Gastrofascism and Empire breaks significant new ground in our understanding of the workings of empire in the circulation of bodies, foodways, and global practices of dependence and colonialism, as well as the decolonizing practices of indigenous food and African anticolonial resistance. In East Africa, Fascist Italy brought older imperial models of global food to a hypermodern level in all its political, technoscientific, environmental, and nutritional aspects. This larger story of food sovereignty-entered in racist, mass settler colonialism-is dramatically different from the plantation and trade colonialisms of other empires and has never been comprehensively told. Using an original decolonizing food studies approach and an unprecedented variety of unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Cinotto describes the different meanings of different foods for different people at different points of the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies and emotions of Ethiopian and Italian men and women, it goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences with food and empire.
Donato De Simone WORLD WAR II EVENTS NARRATED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE CHILDREN CAUGHT IN THE WEB OF ADULT INSANITY A young boy . . . a beautiful town . . . stalked by the Nazis bombed by the Allies . . . hiding Jewish refugees Abruzzos mini-holocaust . . . meeting Padre Pio escape to a new life in America Growing up in the tranquility of the Abruzzo region of Italy, Donato De Simone, Danny to his friends, was abruptly plunged into the violence of war as the Germans and Allies contested for the Sangro River in a major World War II battle. Now, after decades of pondering the meaning of these events, Danny recalls the drama of his times. Mixing humorous touches with his graphic descriptions, he creates for his readers a vivid picture of life in wartime: the nomadic journeys trying to escape the Nazis; the drama of a downed British airman sheltered by his grandfather in a barn; the little-known story of Jewish refugees hidden from the exterminators by sympathetic Italians; watching Allied bombers shot down by German antiaircraft batteries and sent crashing into the Adriatic Sea; finally finding his home destroyed. These are the circumstances under which Danny grew up. His shrewd mothers planning enabling her family to escape German terror, the familys hardships as they slept in a hastily-constructed air raid shelter, titanic efforts to avoid stepping on personnel or anti-car mines, praying that bombs from both sides would miss themall are created anew by this masterful story-teller. The normal educational patterns having been disrupted by war, Danny struggled to learn in makeshift classrooms. After finally succeeding in rejoining his father to America, Danny faced further challenges trying to adjust to a new life, a new culture and a new language. Finally returning to Italy, he married Anna Maria, his childhood sweetheart and fellow war survivor. Returning to America at the urging of Anna Marias father, former U.S. Army private Ernesto Fantini, Danny sailed the Andrea Doriathe trip before she sank! Danny and Anna Maria raised their family in Norristown, Pa., and on June 2, 2006, they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We must have done something wrong, Danny quips. In fifty years we never even had a serious argument! Danny met Padre Pio da Pietrelcina, now Saint Pio, twice as a teenager before coming to America, and once in 1956 together with Anna Maria on their honeymoon. It was an unforgettable experience for both to go to confession and receive Holy Communion from the sainted man who bore on his body the signs of the crucifixion. De Simone does a superb job personalizing the historical record, for his account teaches us what it means to suffer the concrete effects of the abstract decisions made by the generals and dictators and kings - what it means to be the family member whose home is bombed, to be the farmer whose field is mined, to be the child who has seen too much death. Prof. Millicent Marcus Yale University His narrative is most interesting and disturbing at the same time as we realize that so many innocent people, especially the children, were caught in the middle of such insane violence. This is a book for all to read, especially the young. Most Rev. Louis A. De Simone, D. D. Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus Archdiocese of Philadelphia . . . fascinatingly human, fast-reading, well-written. Prof. James T. McDonough St. Josephs University Philadelphia
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